Digital Marketing

Sustaining A SaaS Brand & Organic Channel During A Recession

During a recession, marketing budgets and return on advertising expenditures typically come under increased scrutiny.

You should read this article for reasons you shouldn’t cut back on SEO spending during a recession.

The next question will be about the return on investment and what you can do to mitigate the problems ahead.

During an economic downturn, goals to reduce disruption are inflated. Sales pipelines may see less activity, and C-suite may focus more on MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) and ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).

In this article, I will look at a subscription model business and some of the approaches and strategies that can focus their SEO efforts towards maintaining performance and SEO ROI (Return on Investment).

Understand the reason for canceling accounts

Customers cancel their subscriptions for myriad reasons, but during an economic downturn, the reasons tend to gravitate towards costs and perceived value.

Other reasons include not receiving enough value from a subscription, having difficulty canceling their subscription, or feeling customer support is unresponsive or unhelpful.

You can identify these issues before customers provide feedback on an exit survey. Create opportunities for conversations and feedback loops with the Sales and Customer Service teams. This allows customers to address concerns before canceling.

Targeting disengagement and devaluation

To show this value, we can focus our content and messaging on opportunity costs and how the upfront cost prevents larger shortfalls in the long run.

The friction of use with the software is an identifiable problem.

Within the organization, teams should be able to provide you with access to DAU (Daily Active User) and MAU (Monthly Active User) data.

Companies often boast of having a large number of each, but the data can also be used to identify accounts with lower or spare login frequency, which can then be aggregated and accessed.

  • Set accounts on low and medium subscriptions to an email challenge and get in touch. Consult with an accounts person. You can also ask them to fill out a feedback form to identify pain points to help build a content strategy.
  • Access to accounts with higher level subscriptions with existing account managers.

Addressing customer issues can be as simple as reworking the elements of business product pages, adding additional sections, or enhancing the value proposition with case studies.

You can also tackle these issues with traditional blog content. Add more support articles to your Support Center and build on existing articles with media such as video to address common friction points.

Content development against competitor value risks

Price is probably the most difficult reason to leave to predict and manage. The price is set and dictated by business needs and other costs. While it might make sense to offer deals to high net worth accounts, a massive price cut is probably not an option.

Price and cost are subjective to the value your solution provides. So showing the benefits you’re getting can help clients justify the expense.

The cost of any solution should at least balance the problem or provide additional value.

This is known as a cost-benefit analysis. A vital part of cost-benefit analysis is comparing the costs of a solution against the benefits and determining the net present value.

During this evaluation, your letters can benefit from additional benefits, or feature improvements, and position them against your competitors.

In SaaS, you can break this down into comparisons of product items and overall “package” items:

  • Direct product features and the performance of those features.
  • Indirect product features and “extras” that complement the core product.
  • Solve bandwidth on a monthly or yearly basis.
  • The number of user seats/sub-accounts for each master account.
  • Customer support response speed (and level of customer support).

A typical way to highlight competitors’ shortcomings is with comparison tables, URLs and blogs of our brand versus competitors.

These pages will then compete with your competitors’ versions, independent websites, affiliates, and other reviews for clicks and influence consumer opinion.

You should also explain these benefits and competitive advantages on the product pages themselves.

Listing product features is common. But be sure to explain the benefits directly against your competitors. This can help these competitive advantages resonate better with your target audience.

Promote brand solutions vehicles

A brand composite search term is a term consisting of two or more words that refers to a particular brand.

For example, the brand composite search term “Decathlon waterproofs” highlights users wanting to find Decathlon brand waterproofs specifically.

Users performing searches like this reaffirm the relationship between topics and brands, which helps Google understand relationships and relevance.

To improve your synthetic search terms for a brand, you need to understand the concept of semantic marketing. This means knowing how different words, phrases, and ideas are related in terms of meaning.

You should research how your target audience searches for information about your product or service and use these search terms in your content.

Another strategy you can use is to add modifiers to your search terms.

These can be words like “best,” “how,” or any other delimiters that make the search more specific. This will help you get more targeted traffic that will likely convert better from your general search terms.

summary

While these times are uncertain and competition among users and repeat revenue becomes more fierce, a focus on SEO and content strategy to focus on value propositions and address consumer friction points can help better qualify leads and deliver objection questions that consumers will ask competitors.

In this strategy, search volumes for keywords and other values ​​may not be high. When you address user friction points and concerns, the value is qualitative rather than quantitative.

More resources:

  • SaaS page SEO feature: organic traffic non-branded keywords
  • SEO During The Stagnation (Is It Still Working?)
  • SaaS Content Marketing: A Complete Guide

Featured image: VectorMine/Shutterstock

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